Israeli envoy warns New Yorkers about pro-terror, anti-Israel groups: It will harm your society, not just ours

Ayelet Samerano, whose 21-year-old son, Yonatan Samerano, was shot by Hamas terrorists and abducted by a UNRWA social worker on Oct.7, 2023, is relieved that her desperate calls for action are finally being answered.“Today we’re seeing the results of our hard work,” she told JNS, after the Knesset passed two laws on Monday that make it illegal for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency to operate on Israeli soil, and for Israeli officials to to work with the U.N.

agency.Samerano talked with JNS on Monday night after she spoke at an Oct.7 memorial ceremony at Park East Synagogue, a Modern Orthodox congregation on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.“We are very glad that we succeeded and that UNRWA is out of Israel finally,” she said.More than 600 people attended the event, which the Israeli Consulate General in New York co-organized with the Israeli-American Council.

The Israeli Defense Ministry and the  La’Aretz Foundation also partnered on the event.Samerano, the former hostage Mia Shem and Avi Harush, the father of fallen Israeli soldier Rif Harush, addressed attendees at the event, which was held five days after the anniversary on the Hebrew calendar of Hamas’s Oct.7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel.“I hope everyone listening to me takes this perspective from Yonatan—that you can achieve anything with a smile and a little charm,” Samerano told JNS.

“I believe this is the best wish for the world—that even with our enemies, we try to smile and talk.”Samerano told JNS that she considers her son to be alive, 388 days after he was taken to Gaza as a hostage.Many of the speakers shared harrowing testimonies, drawing tears from many audience members. Speaking in Hebrew, Shem went into painful detail about her experience at the Nova music festival, where she was kidnapped, and of her time in captivity, during which she was held in a cage underground with “no air” for 55 days.(A live translation of Shem’s remarks projected on a sc...